Sam Harnett – KQED Newshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news
KQED Public Media for Northern CAFri, 18 Aug 2017 03:05:08 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2KQED Public Media for Northern CASam Harnett – KQED NewsKQED Public Media for Northern CAKQED NewsSam Harnett – KQED Newshttps://u.s.kqed.net/2015/03/06/KQEDNewsicon.jpghttps://ww2.kqed.org/news
76140667Anita Hill: It’s Time for Women in Tech to Sue for Equalityhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/08/anita-hill-its-time-for-women-in-tech-to-sue-for-equality/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/08/anita-hill-its-time-for-women-in-tech-to-sue-for-equality/#commentsWed, 09 Aug 2017 01:33:26 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11610669Women in tech need to be more proactive in how they take their companies to task on sexism and gender inequality — including filing lawsuits, lawyer Anita Hill told KQED on Tuesday, in response to a senior engineer’s controversial memo condemning Google’s diversity initiatives. Hill is a professor of social policy, law, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis.

The engineer who wrote the memo, James Damore, was fired late Monday. In the memo, he wrote that “biological causes” are part of the reason women aren’t represented equally in Google’s tech departments and leadership. Damore also said men have a “higher drive for status.”

Hill, who made national headlines in 1991 for accusing her former boss Clarence Thomas — then a U.S. Supreme Court nominee — of sexual harassment, said women have to lead the charge to change the culture in tech. For her, that means legal action.

“I’m hesitant to put more on women but I believe that there are some people ready to take that step, and when some step forward to file a complaint, others will join,” she said. “That’s really been my personal experience.”

In a New York Times opinion piece published Tuesday, Hill outlined what she sees as the most effective ways for women to combat sexism, gender inequality and arguments like Damore’s.

“We can’t afford to wait for the tech industry to police itself — and there are few indications that it will ever do so,” she wrote. “Women in the industry should collectively consider their legal options. Top among these would be class-action discrimination cases against employers.”

“I expect there will be co-workers who say you should be grateful to have this position. I think those are the most damaging feedback women can get. Dismissal by their co-workers,” Hill told KQED.

She also noted the emotional toll that lawsuits can take. After she accused Thomas of sexual harassment, he denied all wrongdoing and was confirmed to the high court. Hill was ostracized.

“I have no answer to the problems that’s easy or quick,” she said. “But for those who have gone through the process it can be fulfilling and empowering.”

Despite the lawsuits, women have a vastly marginalized position in tech. Among other things, they are underrepresented by a large degree and receive less pay than their male counterparts.

Adriana Gascoigne, CEO of the nonprofit S.F.-based Girls in Tech, said she agreed “100 percent” with Hill’s assessment that women needed to pursue individual and class-action lawsuits to push back against sexism and inequality in tech.

Yet other women weren’t convinced lawsuits would always be the best route for pushing change in tech.

“That may be necessary but not sufficient,” said Elizabeth Ames, senior vice president at the Palo Alto-based Anita Borg Institute, an advocacy group for women in tech.

One thing that’s clear, however: The focus should be on the work and value that women are contributing to tech and not on a memo written by a man, she added.

“There are many senior-level executive technical women at Google today who are doing fantastic work and we don’t really hear much about them,” Ames said. “Instead, we’re wasting time talking about this guy.”

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/08/anita-hill-its-time-for-women-in-tech-to-sue-for-equality/feed/311610669The Painful Side of Positive Health Care Marketinghttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/21/the-painful-side-of-positive-health-care-marketing/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/21/the-painful-side-of-positive-health-care-marketing/#commentsFri, 21 Jul 2017 15:05:23 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11574201Lori Wallace is sitting on a couch with her 11-year-old son and his new pet snake. It’s burrowing under his armpit, as if it were afraid. But Wallace says it’s not.

“If he was terrified,” Wallace said, “he would be balled up. See, that is why they are called ball pythons. When they are scared, they turn into a little ball.”

Wallace is dying of breast cancer, but a stranger couldn’t tell. She has a pixie haircut and a warm tan. She’s vibrant and chatty and looks you right in the eyes when she talks. Wallace doesn’t shy away from what’s happening to her. She shows me her cracked feet. They bleed from the chemotherapy pills she takes.

She says she used to be a hopeful person, someone who believed you could fight through any misfortune. Then, seven years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Wallace was 39. Her son was 4. She couldn’t believe it.

Wallace, who lives in San Jose, says the chemotherapy treatment makes her brain foggy. She is now in her fifth round. Wallace is Stage 4, metastatic. The cancer has spread throughout her body. It’s going to kill her, she tells me.

“The median survival of a woman with metastatic breast cancer is 33 months,” Wallace says. “My 33 months would have been Dec. 6 last year. So I am on bonus time right now.”

As Wallace’s cancer has progressed, she has become more critical of what she sees as excessive positivity in health care marketing. It’s everywhere: TV ads, radio commercials, billboards. The advertisements feature happy, healed patients and tell stories of miraculous recoveries. The messages are optimistic, about people beating steep odds. Wallace says the ads spread false hope, and for a patient like her they are a slap in the face.

A couple of decades ago you would not have seen ads like this. Hospitals and clinics did not advertise much to customers. Now, they are spending more and more each year on marketing.

Wallace pulls up an ad on her computer from UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. It says “Amid a thousand maybes and a million nos, we believe in the profound and unstoppable power of yes.”

There is a similar kind of optimism at the heart of a lot of Bay Area health provider campaigns. Kaiser Permanente ads are constructed around the word “Thrive”; for Sutter Health it’s “Smile Out.” Wallace says the subtext of the ads is that those like her who get sick and will die maybe just aren’t being positive enough.

‘I have said yes to every possible treatment. And the cancer doesn’t care.’ Lori Wallace

“I didn’t say yes to cancer,” Wallace says. “I have tried everything I can. I have done clinical trials. I have said yes to every possible treatment. And the cancer doesn’t care.”

Karuna Jaggar is executive director of Breast Cancer Action. She says health care providers are following in the footsteps of other companies.

“It’s the basics of marketing,” Jaggar says. “In order to sell products or services, you have to sell hope.”

She says health care advertisers are now adopting the kind of optimistic messaging that really began in force with the pink ribbons and rosy depictions of breast cancer.

“Thirty years ago, breast cancer was the poster child of positive thinking,” Jaggar says. “Look good, feel better, don’t let breast cancer get you down. Fight strong and be cheerful while you do it.”

Thirty or 40 years ago health care providers marketed to physicians more than consumers. The ads were drier, more factual, says Guy David, a professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When the ads are more consumer-facing as opposed to professional-facing, the content tends to be more passionate,” David says.

The ads tug at emotions, just like other advertising that’s trying to win over consumers. With increasing health care costs and choices, patients are shopping around for care. Tim Calkins is a professor of marketing at Northwestern University. He says these days hospitals have to sell themselves.

“Right now in health care if you don’t have some leverage, if you don’t have a brand people care about, if you don’t have a reason for people to pick you over competitors, well then you are in a really tough spot,” Calkins says.

Calkins says hospitals are spending more than ever on advertising and, as with other products, it’s filled with lots of promises. He says you don’t see the same promises in the pharmaceutical industry. Their ads are regulated by the FDA, which is why they have to list all those side effects and show scientific backing for their claims.

“Hospitals aren’t held to any of those standards at all,” Calkins says. “So a hospital can go out and say this is where miracles happen. And here’s Joe. Joe was about to die. And now Joe is going to live forever.”

Lori Wallace is not going to live forever. Before cancer, she says, she would have been attracted to the messages of hope. Now Wallace says she needs realism, acceptance of both the world’s beauty and its harshness. She wrote an essay about that for the women in her breast cancer support group.

The essay is titled “Fuck Silver Linings and Pink Ribbons.” Wallace reads me the whole piece from start to finish. We are sitting at the kitchen table. Her son is nearby with his pet snake.

Toward the middle of the essay Wallace writes, “My ovaries are gone and without them my skin is aging at hyperspeed. I have hot flashes and cold flashes. My bones ache. My libido is shot and my vagina is a desert.” The essay is open, funny and unflinching, just like Wallace.

Before I leave, she reads me the final paragraph. “I will try to be thankful for every laugh, hug and kiss, and other things, too. That is if my chemo brain allows me to remember.”

“That’s what I wrote,” Wallace says. “That’s what I wrote. Brutal honesty.”

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/21/the-painful-side-of-positive-health-care-marketing/feed/511574201San Francisco Supervisor, Tech Company Battle Over Food Delivery Robotshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/20/san-francisco-supervisor-tech-company-battle-over-food-delivery-robots/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/20/san-francisco-supervisor-tech-company-battle-over-food-delivery-robots/#commentsThu, 20 Jul 2017 21:52:30 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11573833The company Marble test-drives its food delivery robots at a little park near its offices in Potrero Hill. The company’s would-be food deliverer of the future is not fancy. The robot is basically an oversized cooler stuck on top of an electric wheelchair frame. It looks like some bulky droid you would see sliding along in the background an old “Star Wars” movie. The roving robot can hold a couple of bags of food, and it navigates with a few sensors and cameras.

Marble is one of several companies developing robots to deliver food. If these companies get their way, fleets of their bots could soon be rolling around urban sidewalks, carrying food once delivered by a human hand. Robots could provide a cheaper, quicker way to get customers food; but this vision has raised concerns about sidewalk safety, job loss and the societal impacts of using robots to increase the speed and ease of consuming goods and services. In San Francisco, one supervisor, Norman Yee, wants to stop the delivery robots from using the city’s sidewalks.

Matthew Delaney is CEO of Marble. He occasionally takes the robots on a test drive in the park, where they’re a big hit with the kids who play there. Not that long ago, Delaney could have been one of those excited kids. Back in middle school, he built an automatic feeder for his family’s fish. That way humans wouldn’t have to feed them.

“The thought never left me,” Delaney said. “We can create these incredible tools and machines and they can do meaningful work for people, and we don’t have to do the boring tasks that we don’t want to do.”

Marble and competitors like Starship Technologies are trying to automate what is known in delivery lingo as the “last mile.” It’s the final leg of delivery, where a product is brought to a customer. It is costly and requires a lot of delivery workers. Automating this final step could save companies money, but it could also cost jobs.

Job loss is one concern San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee has with the delivery robots. But his primary issue is pedestrian safety. What if the robots block pedestrians? How would the city enforce where they go or how fast?

‘Why should they test it here and why should we be the guinea pigs?’ Norman Yee, San Francisco supervisor

Yee does not want San Francisco to be a test subject for unproved technology. “Why should they test it here and why should we be the guinea pigs?” Yee asked. “Test it somewhere else, make it safe.”

Yee decided the robots are impossible to regulate, so he has drafted legislation to ban them from public sidewalks altogether, just like bikes and skateboards. He said he wanted to be proactive, unlike what happened in the city with Lyft and Uber. Their drivers flooded the streets, and now Yee said the city and state are trying to regulate something customers are already attached to.

“What I have seen with innovation and technology is that we let things happen and all the sudden it is irreversible,” Yee said. “The industry gets developed and all the sudden it seems like they have a lot of spare money to lobby policymakers.”

Delaney said that banning the robots altogether is reactionary. He said he is not trying to do the “standard move,” where a tech company rushes something out and hopes it becomes too big to be hampered by regulation. He said the company is “committed to building something that is good for everyone.”

Marble is not waiting around for city regulations. It is already making test deliveries on San Francisco sidewalks. For Delaney, San Francisco is a city to try out new things.

“If you want to see what the future is like, come to San Francisco,” Delaney said. “A lot of the new amazing things are just kind of happening out here. There are, of course, pros and cons to how these things are rolled out. The beacon of innovation is this whole area of the world.”

If Yee’s legislation passes, delivery robots will not keep rolling in San Francisco. But it is a different story down the peninsula in Redwood City, which isn’t opposed to being a test subject for delivery robots. Marble’s competitor, Starship Technologies, has worked with the city and a couple of states to develop regulations that allow their robots to roam the sidewalks.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/20/san-francisco-supervisor-tech-company-battle-over-food-delivery-robots/feed/111573833Amazon Is Being Sued for Mischaracterizing Warehouse Worker, Denying Him Overtimehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/12/amazon-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-mischaracterizing-its-workers/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/12/amazon-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-mischaracterizing-its-workers/#respondTue, 13 Jun 2017 00:06:34 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11506689The question is whether a particular worker at Amazon is a salaried manager or an hourly laborer. The answer could make all the difference, because managers do not get overtime pay and hourly workers do. If Michael Ortiz was mischaracterized as a manager, when he in fact wasn’t, then he may be owed back pay — and potentially so could others in his position.

According to the New York Times, the suit was filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court by former Amazon employee Michael Ortiz, who accuses the company of failing to pay him overtime wages. The law firm that filed the case said over 1,000 Amazon employees in California could be in the same boat: misclassified workers who are collectively missing out on millions of dollars.

Ortiz’s job title was “Level-4 Manager.” But in reality, Ortiz said, he wasn’t actually a manager. He said he barely supervised, but instead spent much of his day moving boxes and unjamming conveyor belts. His lawyer, Scott Cole, said that’s not salaried manager work. It’s hourly manual labor.

“The company has misclassified these managers and is thereby paying them the same amount of money, whether they work 40 hours per week or 80 hours per week,” said Cole. That means no overtime pay, even though Ortiz said he consistently worked more than eight hours per day and 40 hours per week.

“It’s an insidious violation of California’s wage and hour laws,” said Cole, who has also said he will seek class-action status for the suit. He hopes to expand the case to all those in California who are in a similar position: so-called managers who move boxes.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company does not comment on pending lawsuits.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/12/amazon-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-mischaracterizing-its-workers/feed/011506689Valley Farm Towns Are Being Transformed by Online Shoppinghttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/06/valley-farm-towns-transformed-by-your-online-shopping/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/06/valley-farm-towns-transformed-by-your-online-shopping/#commentsTue, 06 Jun 2017 13:20:11 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11489513When Mariela Zepeda is on the clock, time is precious. Zepeda works quickly, her nimble fingers grabbing everything from bottles of pills to boxes of condoms. She’s employed as a “picker” at a CVS distribution center in Patterson.

Everything she picks, she packs into crates, which then get shipped to CVS stores around Northern California. The items end up on store shelves, ready for customers to purchase and start the whole cycle over again.

Zepeda is one of thousands of workers in the Central Valley who labor in the distribution industry. The business sector is booming, in part due to the growth of online retailer Amazon and its commitment to delivering consumer goods to your doorstep at ever faster speeds.

Local governments have welcomed the boost in employment, and they are even investing in training to prepare young people to take the new jobs. But there are questions about whether these jobs pay enough to be long-term solutions for local residents.

Zepeda, for one, has aspirations beyond the distribution and logistics industry. She’s studying to be a history professor. In the meantime, she said the job at the warehouse “is heavy work but it definitely beats fast food chains or anything like that.”

First off, Zepeda said, pay is better. She makes $14.79 an hour. For entry-level distribution jobs, companies advertise starting wages of $12 to $14, sometimes with benefits. They also tout the opportunities to advance within the distribution center, potentially into management positions.

Patterson has about a dozen distribution centers nestled alongside Interstate 5. There’s one for Grainger, Kohl’s, Restoration Hardware and Amazon. The town, like others nearby, is betting on the industry, hoping it will provide jobs for future generations. Philip Alfano is superintendent of the Patterson Joint Unified School District.

“Historically we’ve been an agricultural-based economy,” Alfano said. “With our proximity to the Port of Oakland and rail lines, we’re now emerging as a logistics and supply chain hub.”

The region has the jobs to prove it. Since 2000, warehouse and transport jobs like trucking in Stanislaus County more than doubled, from 4,000 to over 9,000.

“So the question was, who is going to take those jobs?” Alfano said.

Patterson residents, Alfano hopes. That’s why he helped start a vocational program at Patterson High to train kids for the jobs. The district used state grant funds, and chipped in its own money to build a model warehouse, complete with virtual reality forklift simulators.

Teacher Hilario Garcia tries to prepare a student for forklift work at a distribution center. (Erasmo Martinez/KQED)

Teacher Hilario Garcia used to work in the distribution industry, and he gets choked up about his kids getting jobs.

“I used to be them,” Garcia said. “I was that guy in the back, wasn’t the greatest student in class. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Distribution helped Garcia get his start, and it is bringing in more entry-level jobs to an area where employment rates have lagged. But is the industry enough to sustain a community in the long term? Can workers afford a house nearby and support a family?

The city of Tracy is grappling with these questions. It’s about 30 minutes north of Patterson and is another hub for distribution. The industry grew under Michael Maciel, Tracy’s mayor from the end of 2014 to 2016.

‘There were voices that said these aren’t the kind of jobs we want in Tracy.’ Michael Maciel, former mayor of Tracy

He represented a strategy of taking “advantage of this growing segment of the economy,” Maciel said.

Now though, he said, Tracy’s City Council has started taking a more critical approach to the industry. “In the council there were voices that said these aren’t the kind of jobs we want in Tracy,” he said.

Shelley Burcham is Tracy’s economic development manager. “We know that there are citizens that require these entry-level jobs, or that’s their skill set, but we want to up the game,” Burcham said.

The hope is to lure industries with better-paying jobs — sectors like tech or high-skilled manufacturing.

Burcham said a big problem right now in Tracy is that most of its community spends several hours commuting each day for work. Local jobs often do not compensate people enough to afford Tracy, which is on the outer edge of the Bay Area’s real estate crunch.

“About 70 percent of our resident workforce actually commutes out of Tracy every day,” Burcham said. Where do they go? To better-paying jobs in Fremont, San Jose and San Francisco.

Tracy’s City Council wanted to know how much a job would have to pay for someone to afford to live in the city. They called this a “head-of-household job.” After crunching the numbers on real estate prices and cost of living, they arrived at a figure of $72,000 a year. Most jobs at a distribution center don’t pay that much.

As Tracy tries to bring in higher-paying industries, the distribution business here continues to grow. Amazon just opened a second fulfillment center, and now it employs over 3,000 people between the two. In many ways the high-profile company has become the face of the distribution boom.

Local newspapers track the company’s growth and expansion plans. Local politicians debate the quality of jobs and the potential impact of automation. Residents speculate how the future of shopping will affect their own local retail.

Inside a Distribution Center

Amazon’s two squat complexes spread out over large grassy lots in what was once expansive, unbroken agricultural land. As soon as you pass into the building, you are enveloped in sound. Noises made by human workers and machines ricochet off concrete and metal into an indistinguishable industrial din, punctuated occasionally by the beep of a forklift backing up.

Conveyor belts compose the base of this droning. They snake around the entire building, taking abrupt turns, spiraling from ceiling to floor, alternating from metal rollers to long treadmills, speeding up, slowing down, crisscrossing and finally converging like lanes on a large and complex freeway.

An endless stream of brown boxes ride these pathways, traveling from human — the pickers who fill them with items — to the bays of trucks waiting outside. Many will take the same roads as commuters of Tracy, away from the Central Valley to the ranks of consumers in the urban centers of the Bay Area.

Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the jobs at the fulfillment centers may not be long-term solutions for everyone.

“Absolutely we acknowledge that for some folks a job here at Amazon may be a lifelong career path, and for others it might be the step that they need between step one and, you know, step three,” Robinson said.

The Tracy fulfillment center has a classroom and a career program to help workers find jobs at Amazon or even elsewhere. At the CVS distribution center in Patterson, Mariela Zepeda said the company offers flexible schedules to college students like her.

The CVS job is helping her pay her bills and go to college, but Zepeda says she doesn’t think you can raise a family in Patterson with most jobs at a distribution center.

“By myself, with no kids, nothing, maybe I can get by,” she said. “But if you are trying to feed a family, no I don’t think so. I think a lot of places are like that.”

A lot of places. Zepeda is not just talking about the distribution industry. This is Zepeda’s general feeling about employment: There are few jobs that pay enough for people to live where they work. She worries that with automation, the whole situation is just going to get worse.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/06/valley-farm-towns-transformed-by-your-online-shopping/feed/211489513DC_8Teacher Hilario Garcia tries to prepare a student for forklift work at a distribution centerMonterey County’s Flower Industry Is Ailing — Marijuana May Be the Curehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/30/monterey-countys-flower-industry-is-ailing-marijuana-may-be-the-cure/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/30/monterey-countys-flower-industry-is-ailing-marijuana-may-be-the-cure/#commentsTue, 30 May 2017 18:55:42 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11475373Rows of dilapidated greenhouses line the little farm roads on the southeastern outskirts of Salinas. People once called this area the “flower basket of America.” Most of the flowers are now gone, but they could soon be replaced with marijuana.

It’s legal to smoke recreational marijuana in California, but you still can’t grow it commercially. The state plans to start issuing permits sometime in 2018, and people around California are angling to get in on the cash crop. In Monterey County, many who want to start cultivating cannabis — like George Omictin — once made a living growing flowers.

Omictin’s family owns a plot of land southeast of Salinas. The property has a house under construction surrounded by a clutch of rundown greenhouses. A few already have collapsed. Others are in sad shape, leaning to one side or the other, huge holes in their plastic. Omictin said the family had to reinforce the greenhouses; otherwise, a strong storm could have come through and blown more of them down.

His parents were immigrants and migrant workers. They bought property in the early 2000s, trying to become owners instead of laborers. But then cheap flowers from overseas undercut the U.S. market. At one point, Omictin said they were selling bouquets at 10 cents a bunch just so they wouldn’t rot in the greenhouses.

George Omictin’s family used to grow flowers in Monterey County. Now some of the greenhouses are in disrepair. (Sam Harnett/KQED)

The family hasn’t grown flowers since 2008. Instead, they have been renting out the greenhouses, trying to make enough money to stay afloat while they search for a sustainable way to earn a living and hold onto their land. The family has debts to pay off. To do that, they will no longer grow pretty flowers, Omictin said, but perhaps smokable ones.

Monterey County is helping flower growers get into the marijuana business. It passed an ordinance saying you can grow cannabis only in old greenhouses. Aaron Johnson, a local lawyer who specializes in marijuana, says the county is trying to do two things: to save the greenhouses and prevent new cannabis farms from springing up all over the place.

‘Basically, the county threw a life vest to save us now.’George Omictin

“You have these vast crop lands. They didn’t want those to be paved over for greenhouses,” Johnson said. “So they basically said, ‘Look, keep it at the existing greenhouses, use these things that are falling down.’ ”

The ordinance suddenly turned the eyesore greenhouses on the outskirts of Salinas into valuable commodities.

“Literally within a period of two weeks I saw the prices go from $50,000 an acre for undeveloped industrial land to about $300,000 an acre,” Johnson said.

“Basically, the county threw a life vest to save us now,” Omictin said.

At first, Omictin’s conservative father was reluctant to grab the life vest because marijuana is a drug. He worried SWAT teams might come in and raid the place. His son eventually convinced him that cannabis could be a lifesaver. And the fact that the federal government still labels marijuana a drug was actually a big part of its appeal.

Because cannabis is in a legal gray area, it may be a more commercially reliable crop than flowers. Marijuana cannot be legally transported across international borders the way flowers are. They pour in from South American countries where workers are paid far less and the flowers are far cheaper.

The stream of cheap flowers from places like Colombia has put many U.S. growers out of business, said Kasey Cronquist, CEO of the California Cut Flower Commission. Today Cronquist said only a handful of rose or chrysanthemum growers are left in the country and not a single farmer who grows carnations.

“People can’t believe it,” Cronquist said. “How did we do this? How did we get here? Well, it goes back to these trade agreements in the early ’90s, and the rest is history.”

A fieldworker harvests flowers at a farm near Moss Beach. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

That history begins with cocaine. Starting in 1991, the U.S. signed trade deals aiming to get South American cocaine growers to cultivate flowers instead. First there was the Andean Trade Preference Act, and then in 2012 the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Through these deals, the government has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, and it has cut tariffs on South American flowers.

Cronquist said the U.S. overlooked the microeconomic effects of these trade deals on individual industries like cut flowers. Instead, he said the country focused on the diplomatic effort to limit cocaine production, which despite U.S. intervention still continues in South America. Cronquist called the whole endeavor “trade policy run amok.”

To survive the cheap U.S.-subsidized flowers streaming in from South America, farmers here sought protected niches. Some tried potted flowers. They are in soil that is very difficult to transport across borders because of customs restrictions. Other farmers got into edible crops like lettuce, which are highly perishable.

In Salinas, families like the Omictins are now betting on cannabis. They hope the feds won’t crack down once they start growing. But at the same time, they want marijuana to remain in enough of a legal gray area that it is protected from the forces of globalization. Otherwise, marijuana farmers overseas could start shipping in boatloads of legal product at dirt-cheap prices.

Then they would be right back where they started: with greenhouses filled with weeds that no one wants to buy.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/30/monterey-countys-flower-industry-is-ailing-marijuana-may-be-the-cure/feed/211475373Pot FlowersGeorge Omictin's family used to grow flowers. Now some of the greenhouses are in disrepair.Coming Soon: Software That Can Perfectly Imitate Your Voicehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/17/coming-soon-software-that-can-perfectly-imitate-your-voice/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/17/coming-soon-software-that-can-perfectly-imitate-your-voice/#commentsWed, 17 May 2017 07:15:43 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11450390If your best friend or your mom gives you a call on the telephone, you probably know who it is right away. You trust that if you hear their voices, it could only be them. Well, that could soon change. A new company called Lyrebird is working on software that can copy someone’s voice and make it say anything. Listen to this.

This is an entirely fake conversation Lyrebird made and posted on its website as an example of what its software can do. The technology is far from perfect. Voices still sound robotic and disjointed. Still, if you listen to this audio sample, you can most likely identify who the software is copying: former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump. The fact that it can get this close raises questions about what will happen in the not-so-distant future.

According to Lyrebird, a minute-long recording of a voice is all it takes to start replicating it. While it sounds robotic now, they say the software will soon get much better. As more data are fed into the company’s algorithms, they teach themselves how to sound more human. It’s machine learning, which means there could be exponential improvement, said Steve Weber, professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

“What sounds like close today, in a year could sound perfect or fundamentally indistinguishable, at least by the human ear,” Weber said.

He said if Lyrebird doesn’t reach that point, someone else soon will.

“I am confident that it is being done in government and non-commercial realms,” Weber said. “And it has been worked on for some time, I would expect.”

If the technology is perfected it would open that old Pandora’s box. There would be the potential for all kinds of fake news, impersonations and scams. People could synthesize a recording of a powerful figure, like Trump, saying anything. Anything.

Remember “The War of The Worlds,” Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama where fake journalists reported an alien invasion? Imagine how scary that would be if someone inserted the voices of presidents into the drama, and instead of a War of the Worlds, it was a war between countries.

Jose Sotelo is one of Lyrebird’s three founders, all computer science Ph.D. students at the University of Montreal. He realizes their technology could be dangerous, which is actually part of the reason they are developing and planning to release it.

“We believe that we can really mitigate the problems by making it public in the same way that right now, if you see an image of myself standing on the moon, you’re likely to think this image is fake because you know the existence of image-editing software,” Sotelo said.

While admittedly scary, Sotelo said the company’s voice replication technology has noble applications. It could bring back the voices of cancer patients who can no longer speak, or of a deceased loved one, which is an interesting idea but could also be a bit unsettling. Regardless of how you feel about positive uses, Sotelo said someone has to show the world that voices can be copied.

“It is not a really comforting solution, not being able to trust audio anymore,” Sotelo said, “but we believe this is basically the only solution available.”

Lyrebird plans to make its software available for other developers to use, and the founders said they want to be public about the capabilities of their technology.

Just because Lyrebird is putting the work out in public, does that absolve the company from potential misuses? Is it ethical to further this technology and release it to the world? Lots of tech companies try to sidestep ethical questions by being transparent, said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor and director at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology.

“I think people often think about transparency as some magic pixie dust,” Mulligan said. “So we’re going to be transparent about what we’re doing and therefore somehow the public is going to be knowledgeable, and the assumption is they are going to engage in some kind of self help. What kind of self-help are you going to do?”

We would need to learn to live in a world where voices can be copied and can’t be trusted — where just because it sounded like your mother or friend or president said something, it won’t mean they actually did.

That world could take people a long time to get used to.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/17/coming-soon-software-that-can-perfectly-imitate-your-voice/feed/111450390How Researchers Are Using Yelp to Study an Impact of Rising Minimum Wageshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/04/study-shines-light-on-one-particular-effect-of-rising-minimum-wages-in-bay-area/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/04/study-shines-light-on-one-particular-effect-of-rising-minimum-wages-in-bay-area/#commentsThu, 04 May 2017 07:15:24 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11438708Rising minimum wages are increasing the chance some restaurants in the Bay Area will close, but not just any restaurants — mostly those with average and poor Yelp reviews.

These are the findings of a new paper published by the Harvard Business School titled “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.” While the study links rising minimum wage, low Yelp reviews and restaurant closures, the authors say we should not conclude from their work that rising minimum wages are generally bad for the economy or employment. The story about the total effects of minimum wage is far more complex, with many positive and negative ramifications to consider.

Study authors Dara Lee Luca and Michael Luca looked at Yelp data from 2008 to 2016. During that time they found that lower Yelp ratings meant a higher probability of closing. Places with only 3½ stars, about average, were 14 percent more likely to close after a minimum wage increase of $1. Restaurants with five stars, a perfect rating, were not affected at all.

“The restaurants that are already struggling are more likely to be affected by shocks to their cost structure,” Michael Luca said.

Economists are excited about this paper in part because it uses a novel data set: Yelp reviews. Michael Luca says it was possible to link that data to minimum wages in a meaningful way because different cities across the Bay Area are increasing those wages at different times. This allows for many comparisons and to control for other factors that might be affecting restaurant closings.

‘The Bay Area is basically a laboratory for understanding the minimum wage.’ Michael Luca, Harvard Business School professor

“The Bay Area is basically a laboratory for understanding the minimum wage,” Michael Luca says. “There have been 21 different minimum wage changes during our study period.”

In the restaurant business, where margins are just a few percent, extra pressure like increased labor costs can send a place already on the edge overboard. Take Rose Pistola for instance.

Rose Pistola was an Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood with a 3.5 rating on Yelp. Laurie Thomas owned the place, along with two other restaurants. Her two additional establishments are still in operation, but she closed Rose Pistola in February after a 21-year run. That is a long run. According to analysis in the Harvard Business School paper, places in San Francisco usually last around six years.

Rose Pistola was Thomas’ largest restaurant. It had an event space and took a lot of staff to run. She said the restaurant’s business model made more economic sense when you could pay people less.

“You know it was 20 years ago,” when they opened, she said, and there was “very low minimum wage, no health care requirements, no sick pay requirements.” Thomas added that even though increased labor costs made it harder on her business, she is happy that pay and benefits have increased for workers.

Thomas said the increased labor cost was just one of many reasons she had to close the restaurant. She said in recent years there had been less tourist foot traffic in North Beach, perhaps because people started heading to newly trendy neighborhoods like the Mission. Thomas said last summer’s season was especially slow, and then the January rains came, which further dampened business.

‘The full-service restaurant space in general is kind of in a crisis mode.’ Gwyneth Borden, Golden Gate Restaurant Association director

Restaurants similar to Thomas’ are in danger, according to Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

“The full-service restaurant space in general, not just in San Francisco but throughout the country, is kind of in a crisis mode,” Borden said.

American dining is changing. Borden said we are seeing the rise of more fast casual places with counter service and less staff. In San Francisco, there is also tons of competition. Maybe too much. According to 2010 census data, the city has about one restaurant for every 250 households. Borden said that is the highest per capita in the country.

Given all that, Borden said, “It’s not particularly surprising that lower-starred restaurants on Yelp exit as minimum wage increases.”

It is also not surprising the Harvard paper’s findings are being mischaracterized and weaponized, as so often happens in the contentious minimum wage debate. Even the language used in the media to describe changes in minimum wage policies is politicized and polarizing.

Conservative bloggers are writing that the paper shows raising the minimum wage hurts those it intends to help, and also that it causes affordable restaurants to suffer and for their employees to have fewer job opportunities. The paper’s co-authors said the study shows no such things. Paul Wolfson, a research associate at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, agrees.

“From the paper I would say it’s an interesting effect of the minimum wage,” Wolfson said. “I don’t think I would go from that to say it is good or bad.”

In this case maybe rising minimum wages are just weeding out mediocre restaurants that will be replaced by ones better suited for the market. Maybe the extra money in workers’ pockets will boost the economy and create more and better jobs. Wolfson said the overall economic impact of minimum wage increases is difficult to suss out even after years of research on the topic.

“The state of the literature has been too narrow and hasn’t been really the kind of quality you would want to make grand claims about the effects of the minimum wage,” Wolfson said.

He said he has probably read more papers on minimum wage than almost anyone. He co-wrote a book that analyzes and evaluates the state of the research called, “What Does the Minimum Wage Do?” He said economists have long focused on one thing, potential negative effects on employment, particularly for teenagers.

“It’s been incredible tunnel vision,” Wolfson said, adding that it will be years before we have a clearer picture. To work toward that goal, economists are turning to the Bay Area, where all the different minimum wage increases are creating a kind of laboratory for real-world study.

When I visited Urban Ore, Chicken John was picking up some rusty, squeaky ironing boards. John is from “the San Francisco Institute of Possibility.” He runs this “rotten boat-building contest” in the summer, where kids and adults create vessels out of trash. “Whoever builds the worst boat wins,” John said.

Urban Ore operates out of a cavernous 3-acre warehouse. It’s filled with all sorts of thrown-out stuff for sale: appliances, furniture, scrap metal, artwork, antiques, a giant papier-mache dragon head. The collection of old doors alone is impressive. The place has somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000.

Urban Ore is filled to the brim with all sorts of reclaimed trash. (Sam Harnett/KQED)

End of an Era

The owners of Urban Ore estimate that the business keeps some 7,000 or 8,000 tons of trash per year out of landfills. It’s difficult to verify how much Urban Ore actually diverts from the landfill, but even if it’s only a fraction of what the owners claim, it would make the business a major cog in Berkeley’s thriving recycling ecosystem. And it could disappear. That’s because the owners of the 36-year-old business, Dan Knapp and Mary Lou Van Deventer, are ready to retire.

Urban Ore is one of the many businesses in the Bay Area run by baby boomers on the edge of retirement. New analysis of census data by the nonprofit Project Equity finds that in the Bay Area, boomers hold nearly half of all privately owned businesses with employees. As they retire, they’re selling off their companies or just closing shop.

The Iron Law

Decades ago, Knapp quit his job as a sociology professor and started riding his bike to the dump, salvaging what he could. Over the years, he and Van Deventer built the business by sorting and selling garbage — squeezing juice from the trash, as they say around here.

This is the key to the business: Dan Knapp’s 12-category system for sorting and processing trash. (Sam Harnett/KQED)

Knapp devised a meticulous system for splitting it all into categories. By separating reusable items, from metal and chemicals, there is less cross-contamination. The trash can be resold, the scrap metal recycled and the chemicals disposed of safely. “I call it the iron law of recycling,” Knapp said. “The more categories the more money.”

Knapp said, “We bought the place at $3 million and it’s worth three times that now.”

“Both our lawyer and our banker have advised us to sell the property and take the money.” Van Deventer added, “but we said we spent our lives building the business.”

Transition of Power

The couple are now in their 70s, and they want the business to be around long after they’re gone. But Knapp’s kids don’t want the Ore, and they said an outsider wouldn’t know how to run it.

‘I call it the iron law of recycling. The more categories the more money.’ Dan Knapp, Co-owner of Urban Ore

“The nature of the business is in the activity of it,” Van Deventer said. “It’s in the busyness.”

It’s in the 38 busy employees who know how the Ore works — what makes the business tick. If only the couple could somehow transfer the company to them.

Alison Lingane is co-founder of Project Equity, a 3-year-old nonprofit that aims to help companies move to employee ownership.

“Most people aren’t aware that employee ownership is an option,” Lingane said. “That they have a potential buyer right there under their nose.”

Lingane thinks employee ownership could be a great way to keep baby boomer businesses and the income they generate local. Project Equity crunched census numbers and found that over 60,000 businesses in the Bay Area are owned by aging boomers. The nonprofit is working with Urban Ore, which Lingane hopes can be a model for other entrepreneurs getting ready to retire.

“Are we going to sit back and let these businesses either quietly go away or be consolidated — bought by out-of-area buyers, so wealth becomes concentrated? Or are we going to take this opportunity to keep at least a chunk of them locally owned and deepen their roots by transitioning them to employee ownership?” Lingane asked.

She said American business owners are unfamiliar with how to transfer power to their workers. With Lingane’s guidance, employees are preparing to use Urban Ore’s equity to take out a loan and buy the company. It would become a worker-owned co-op like Rainbow Grocery or Arizmendi Bakery. There would still be a similar management structure, but workers would share in both the profits and the decision-making.

Shoulders of Giants

Christopher Sprague, receiving manager at Urban Ore, says it would be great for employees to have greater ownership of the business. (Sam Harnett/KQED)

Max Wechsler, Urban Ore’s assistant manager, is excited to keep the original owners’ vision going. “At night I read stuff that they’ve written,” Wechsler said. “They’re such valuable resources. So I am standing on the shoulders of giants here.”

Wechsler, like many of the Ore’s employees, is deeply connected to the mission of the company: working toward a world with zero waste. He grew up at a scrap yard and paid his way through college salvaging trash.

“My brother, my father and I would drive around in a pickup truck, just a few blocks ahead of the garbage truck, trash-picking,” Wechsler said.

Letting Go

Tucked in their office at Urban Ore, Knapp and Van Deventer said they want to transfer the business as soon as possible. I asked Van Deventer if she will be nostalgic handing over the company after all these years building it up.

“Oh yes, for sure,” she replied, “but I’ll get over that in about three days.” That made them both laugh heartily.

“What about all the stuff?” I asked. “Will you miss it?”

“When you’ve been in the business this long, and you’ve seen so much flow past your eyes every single day, you lose your lust to own and possess,” Van Deventer said. “You can see a beautiful thing and appreciate its beauty and maximize its beauty, so that somebody will come in and find it as beautiful as you find and they’ll take it home.”

I wondered aloud if you could say the same thing about their whole business. “That’s right,” she said, “That’s right.” The pair spent their lives building a successful company out of heaps of trash. In the process they’ve lost the lust to possess, and now, they’re ready to pass it all on.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/14/berkeleys-scrappiest-entrepreneurs-hope-co-op-model-will-keep-business-alive-after-they-retire/feed/211353196StuffUrban Ore is filled to the brim with all sorts of reclaimed trash.Twelve CategoriesThis is the key to the business: Dan Knapp's 12-category system for sorting and processing trash.ChrisChristopher Sprague, receiving manager, says it would be great for employees to have greater ownership of Urban Ore.Can’t Get Any Work Done? New Survey Reveals Politics Is Killing Productivityhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/02/cant-get-any-work-done-new-survey-reveals-politics-is-killing-productivity/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/02/cant-get-any-work-done-new-survey-reveals-politics-is-killing-productivity/#commentsThu, 02 Mar 2017 22:48:02 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11330334Only one time before has CEO Andy Ruben seen his co-workers so distracted by the news, and that was a very different situation: 9/11.

Ruben is CEO of Yerdle, a San Francisco company that helps retailers resell used products. Since the election of Donald Trump and subsequent political turmoil, Ruben said it has been hard to keep his workers focused.

“Their general feeling about the world right now is absolutely affecting their ability to show up and be productive at work,” Ruben said.

How much of an impact are we talking about here? Well, that’s a tough thing for businesses to measure. Kris Duggan wanted to get a concrete answer.

‘This is like a whole new world of distraction.’ Kris Duggan, CEO of BetterWorks

Duggan is CEO of BetterWorks, which develops software to manage employee performance. Since the election, even his own employees have been unfocused. “This is like a whole new world of distraction,” Duggan said.

Instead of recharging on weekends, like good worker bees, employees are out protesting. At work they are posting on social media and debating with colleagues. To try to quantify this distraction, Duggan commissioned the consultancy firm Wakefield Research to do a national survey of 500 full-time employees.

“The results were shocking,” Duggan said. “We found that 87 percent of employees are reading political social media posts during the workday.”

The survey found that workers on average are spending two hours reading or talking about political news at work. For some employees it’s three or four hours a day. And it’s not just liberals in the Bay Area. People from across the political spectrum and across the country have become news junkies.

The survey was conducted by Nathan Richter. He said interest in political news normally peaks around the election season, but he has never seen anything like this. “This is a whole new mountain rising out of the ocean and kind of towering over the landscape,” he said.

What’s most surprising, Richter said, is how current events have changed corporate culture. People are now talking politics at work, and not just with co-workers. According to the survey, nearly a third of respondents have talked to a client or customer about politics. More than a third have talked to a boss or a manager.

“That’s insanity,” Richter said. “Most career coaches, I think, would tell you to change the topic.”

Even employees who are not posting or talking about politics on the job are still distracted by it. Take Amanda Delzell, an employee at BetterWorks.

Delzell said she had never made a political post on social media before the election. She didn’t want to be “that person,” the one who is always opining on social media. But all of that changed Nov. 8.

Delzell has friends and family on both sides of the political divide. She could not believe what some of them were posting on social media after the election. She could restrain herself no longer.

Delzell began commenting, arguing and crafting elaborate responses in her head. It was exhausting and damaging to her mental well-being. Literally. It started bringing back some of the anxiety she had overcome years ago with therapy.

“During the height of all this I was experiencing anxiety attack symptoms again,” Delzell said.

‘I’ll typically be awake at 3 or 4 in the morning catching up on these articles.’ Christine Nguyen Vaeth, BetterWorks employee

Her co-worker, Christine Nguyen Vaeth, is losing sleep.

She stays up reading all the news she missed at work. “I’ll typically be awake at 3 or 4 in the morning catching up on these articles,’ Nguyen Vaeth said.

Sure, a good night’s sleep will make her less groggy at work. But Nguyen Vaeth said it’s our responsibility as citizens to be informed — especially now, when there is so much at stake.

As a boss you can’t stop people from reacting to what’s happening in the world, said Yerdle CEO Andy Ruben.

“Clamping down and trying to deny people the way that they’re feeling outside of work would be counterproductive,” Ruben said.

He said he wants to keep his staff efficient. But he said it’s important to remember that people spend a lot of their time at work, and they need a place to discuss what’s on their minds. And right now, there is a lot on their minds.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/02/cant-get-any-work-done-new-survey-reveals-politics-is-killing-productivity/feed/111330334PG&E Is Using H-1B Visas to Send IT Jobs Overseashttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/10/pge-is-using-h-1b-visas-to-send-it-jobs-overseas/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/10/pge-is-using-h-1b-visas-to-send-it-jobs-overseas/#commentsFri, 10 Feb 2017 22:57:31 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11304045Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is cutting some 70 IT jobs and sending them to a contractor based in India. This kind of outsourcing has become commonplace in the IT industry. It has been criticized for years, and there is a lot of talk in Washington, D.C., these days about how to slow it down.

PG&E is sending the jobs overseas as part of a larger restructuring plan to cut costs. The San Francisco Business Times first reported on how the offshoring of jobs to India fits into the plan.

“The focus is really on doing the right thing for our customers and the right thing for the business over the long term. That’s what this is about, and it’s what drove the decision,” PG&E spokesman Brian Hertzog said.

PG&E workers are training their replacements, some of whom are here in the U.S. on H-1B work visas. Hertzog says the jobs are related to older IT applications that PG&E wants to phase out. The H-1B workers are going to learn the ropes for the IT jobs and then send those tasks to workers in India who are far cheaper.

“It’s knowledge transfer,” said Paul Almeida, president of the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees, and a critic of the practice. “They’re just transferring the knowledge of the business to these foreign countries through these outsourcing firms.”

The outsourcing firms used by companies like PG&E to offload IT jobs are mostly based in India and get thousands of H-1B visas for their workers. This shouldn’t happen, Almeida said. The visa is designed for high-skilled workers who can’t be found in the U.S., not people doing routine IT work.

Almeida said these outsourcers are abusing the H-1B system and undercutting American workers like those at PG&E.

“When this was happening 10 years ago, it wasn’t as blatant,” Almeida said. “But it has gone on for so long. It’s become part of the business model.”

PG&E is far from the first to use a contractor that depends heavily on H-1B visas. Disney has done it. So has Toys R Us, other utilities like Southern California Edison, and recently a public university. UC San Francisco is outsourcing IT jobs right now. The contractor there initially brought in a transition team to understand how the university’s IT systems work — some of the workers were on H-1B visas.

“Nothing has happened that would deter companies from taking this action,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.

Costa said there have been attempts to reform the H-1B visa program. The Department of Labor and Department of Justice investigated Southern California Edison for the use of H-1B visas, but neither found wrongdoing.

Costa says those findings are disputable, adding that they encourage companies to outsource with the H-1B.

“It’s about the bottom line,” Costa said, “and if companies can do it, they will do it. If the legal framework continues to allow it, then it will continue to happen.”

There has been a lot of anger about this kind of job loss. It’s a theme that President Trump has tapped into, and he’s signaled he plans to change the H-1B in some way. Members of Congress from both sides have introduced reform bills. Meanwhile, the IT industry and workers are anxiously waiting to see what will happen.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/10/pge-is-using-h-1b-visas-to-send-it-jobs-overseas/feed/1411304045What Does It Really Mean When Reporters Say ‘Wage Hike’?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/08/what-does-it-really-mean-when-reporters-say-wage-hike/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/08/what-does-it-really-mean-when-reporters-say-wage-hike/#commentsWed, 08 Feb 2017 23:53:05 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11293552You’ve probably come across the term “wage hike” a lot lately, especially since California and 18 other states just increased the minimum wage.

“Wage hike” appears in headlines and articles everywhere: on Fox, CBS, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. The list goes on. When journalists use “wage hike,” it is often inserted interchangeably with “wage increase.” We do it here at KQED — in our headlines, articles and on the air.

I was about to put the little phrase into a previous story about a fast food CEO who said rising minimum wages have been great for his business. I had already written “increase” about a half-dozen times and was grasping for a synonym. “Hike” was the first word that came to mind. But then I thought, why “hike”? What does that word actually mean? Why do journalists use it? Why not just write “increase”?

It is no surprise journalists have fallen in love with the phrase “wage hike,” said Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary.

“‘Hike’ is a typical journalist word because it makes its copy punchier, it helps avoid redundancy and it fits better in a headline,” Connor Martin said.

Originally, “hike” had nothing to do with economics. Connor Martin said the word emerged in early 19th century England as a verb for walking vigorously or laboriously. But before long, “hike” came to be used transitively with an object to mean moving, pulling or lifting something — like hiking up a skirt or trousers.

The OED documents the first use of “hike” in reference to price in 1904, and it’s not used to tell a happy story. A reporter for the Topeka Capitalnewspaper wrote that a local store “hiked” ice cream prices from 5 to 10 cents. Bad news for ice cream buyers.

These are the top 10 modifiers of hike according to a scan of recent books and journalism. (Screenshot of Word Sketch Software)

To find out how “hike” is used today, Connor Martin ran a scan of recent books and journalism to find words “hike” is often used to modify. She finds the most common word pairs almost all refer to things people generally do not want. The list includes things like tax hike, rate hike, fare hike, fuel price hike, fee hike and tuition hike, along with wage and pay hikes.

Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at the UC Berkeley School of Information, said, “When things hike, there is always the sense that things are being pulled up against their nature.” Using “hike,” he said, implies some outside force is yanking up the trousers or skirts or wages.

This is the problem when journalists use “hike,” Nunberg said. It suggests raising minimum wages is unnatural, and that is editorializing. He said there is a better word out there: “increase.”

“‘Increase’ is a neutral word,” Nunberg said, “Things can increase for the better or for the worse. When you want to emphasize the positive effects of a raise or increase, you don’t use ‘hike.’”

Nunberg calls the word “hike” particularly pernicious because no one notices it. It blends in to what he calls the “linguistic wallpaper.”

He said that the next time I report on the minimum wage, I should stick to the totally neutral word “increase” and save “hike” for stories about trousers and vigorous walks.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/08/what-does-it-really-mean-when-reporters-say-wage-hike/feed/211293552Top 10 modifiers of HikeThese are the top 10 modifiers of hike according to a scan of recent books and journalism.Another Lawmaker Asks UC President to Halt UCSF Layoffshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/26/another-lawmaker-asks-uc-president-to-halt-ucsf-layoffs/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/26/another-lawmaker-asks-uc-president-to-halt-ucsf-layoffs/#respondThu, 26 Jan 2017 23:41:44 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11286563This time the letter came from Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman.

In his letter to UC President Janet Napolitano on Wednesday, Huffman of San Rafael denounced UCSF’s decision to send nearly 100 IT jobs to a multinational contractor overseas. IT employees at UCSF began training their replacements in October, and if Napolitano does not step in, several dozen of the IT workers will lose their jobs by the end of February. The employees had received layoff notices in July 2016.

Lawmakers, academics and unions have sent almost a dozen letters to Napolitano criticizing the outsourcing. At the UC Regents meeting Thursday, UCSF employee Keith Pavlik read off the names of all the letter writers to board members, hoping to get their attention.

Those who have sent letters include UCSF’s Faculty Association, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But Napolitano has not budged on the issue. Her office has not yet responded to a request for comment.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/26/another-lawmaker-asks-uc-president-to-halt-ucsf-layoffs/feed/011286563Trump Election Spurs Sales of Books About White Working Class and Totalitarianismhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/19/trump-election-spurs-sales-of-books-about-white-working-class-and-totalitarianism/
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/19/trump-election-spurs-sales-of-books-about-white-working-class-and-totalitarianism/#respondThu, 19 Jan 2017 22:46:36 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11275396Thanks to the election of Donald Trump, Dog Eared Books in San Francisco has a whole new section. It’s right up front and filled with books about social justice.

Dan Weiss, head buyer of new books for the store, created the section the day after the election. It has books about rural white America, like Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Strangers in Their Own Land,” and ones about activism, like Angela Davis’ “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.” Other bookstores, like City Lights and Alley Cat, have created similar areas and have similar books.

“It’s not a selfless gesture,” Weiss said. “We’re making money on it as a store. I don’t want to make us sound like heroes, because we’re not. But it feels good to make this information more available.”

Ryan Smith (left) and Dan Weiss (right) of Dog Eared Books in front of the book section Weiss created in response to Donald Trump’s election. (Sam Harnett/KQED)

Weiss said he also wanted to feature books that give some political and social insights into what is happening in America. People told him again and again about one particular book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” by Hannah Arendt. He ordered it, and the book immediately sold. Copies have been flying off the shelves ever since.

Surging Sales

Other books have seen a spike in sales after Trump’s election. Titles about the white working class and rural America have done particularly well — books like “White Trash” by Nancy Isenberg and “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance. “Hillbilly Elegy” started selling three times as fast after the election, according to the book’s publisher. As of Jan. 18, it was once again on top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.

But these books are new and intended for a popular audience. They were already selling well before the election. “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” not so much. Weiss said Dog Eared Books usually sold just a few copies a year and often bought the book on publisher overstock or remainder.

“The Origins of Totalitarianism” is a dense tome of political theory published in 1951. In over 500 pages, author Arendt details the elements in society that led to the rise of Stalinism and Nazism. The book is not typically a hot commodity. But by mid-December, many Bay Area bookstores were sold out. Even Amazon briefly ran out of stock.

Jim Milliot, editorial director of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly, said demand for Arendt’s book started to rise right after Trump’s election.

Milliot said about 50 copies of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” normally sell nationally each week, according to data from Nielsen BookScan. When sales of the book peaked in December, it was selling at 16 times that rate.

Milliot said these are very good numbers for a decades-old book of political theory. He added that the surge in demand was not some holiday bump — December 2015 saw no surge in sales. Milliot said this isn’t the kind of book someone would normally give as a Christmas present.

Berkowitz says it makes sense that people are turning to Arendt now, because the right-wing populism and dissatisfaction with government sweeping through Europe and the U.S. is reminiscent of what happened in the 1920s and ’30s in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.

Arendt identified three major social problems back then, which Berkowitz said are still relevant today: rootlessness, loneliness and homelessness — not lacking a physical house, but the larger sense of being disconnected from a place where you feel at home. Berkowitz said these modern ills are all slightly different, but “their overarching impact is the same, which is that we live in a world in which people don’t feel as if their lives have purposes or meaning.”

Arendt wrote about how these conditions open the door for totalitarianism, a political system in which the state has complete power and establishes a single ideology that people follow en masse. Arendt investigated how, once that kind of mass movement begins, individuals no longer accept rational arguments that contradict their ideology. She wrote that they will sacrifice even their own well-being to preserve a movement that has become the central thing that gives their lives meaning.

The Burden of Our Times

Trump started a movement with some unsettling characteristics, Berkowitz said — like how the campaign handled facts — but that Trump is no totalitarian. He said we should not exaggerate the comparison between now and the 1920s and 1930s.

“Arendt would be the first that point out that we are not living in a totalitarian era right now,” Berkowitz said, but “that doesn’t mean that one can’t emerge.”

Berkowitz said some of the interest in this book today undoubtedly, and perhaps unfortunately, comes from the title, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which may seem to promise answers to readers.

Berkowitz said Hannah Arendt actually did not like the title, which came from the publisher. She didn’t think you could pinpoint the origins of totalitarianism because of the messy complexity of the world.

Berkowitz said the book gives readers the analytical tools to see the elements in society that increase the potential for totalitarianism, like loneliness and the isolation or “atomization” of individuals. Arendt originally wanted to call the book “The Burden of Our Times.”

Difficult Books for Difficult Times

At Dog Eared Books, Dan Weiss said readers are feeling uncertainty about the future, and they’re searching for a way to understand it. That’s one reason they’re buying challenging books.

“People are feeling more commitment, I think, to read things that are difficult right now than they would have before,” Weiss said.

But some customers are coming in because they want to steer clear of the real world altogether. Since the election, Weiss said, the store has sold quite a few science fiction novels.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/19/trump-election-spurs-sales-of-books-about-white-working-class-and-totalitarianism/feed/011275396IMG_1073Store manager Ryan Smith (left) and Dan Weiss (right) in front of the book section Weiss created in response to Donald Trump's election.